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Justus Robertson

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Blocks World
A good portion of my graduate work has had to do with automated planning applied to interactive narrative generation. Planning is the process of finding a sequence of actions that will transform some world's initial state into a goal state. A famous problem world, called a domain, used as an example in planning is called Blocks World. Three things exist in most Blocks World examples: a robot arm, a table, and a collection of three wooden blocks labeled A, B, and C. In Blocks World, the three blocks can rest on the table or on each other. The robot arm can pick a block up if no other block is resting on top of it and the robot is not already holding a block. Finally, the robot arm can place a block it is holding on the table or on top of another block. The goal of Blocks World problems is to start from some initial configuration of blocks and use the robot arm to unstack and re-stack blocks until some pre-specified configuration is achieved.